In this article, … [w]e argued that incompetence … not only causes poor performance but also the inability to recognize that one’s performance is poor. Indeed, across the four studies, participants in the bottom quartile not only overestimated themselves, but thought they were above-average…. In a phrase, Thomas Gray was right: Ignorance is bliss—at least when it comes to assessments of one’s own ability.
….
In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, 77 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1121-1134, at 1130-31, 1132 (1999)
The Hon. Harold R. Medina Sr., from Life Magazine
“[T]he qualities that are most valuable in any profession are the ones which cannot be bought at any price; and they are plain ordinary guts and loyalty. We have heard so much loose talk about loyalty in the past few years [late 1940s/early 1950s] that the ordinary garden variety seems to have been forgotten. I mean that loyalty to one’s college, to one’s friends, to one’s family, to one’s religion; the kind that builds from teh ground up and makes loyalty to one’s country inevitable and adamantine. … [Success at the bar and in life depends] upon a combination of unswerving, unselfish loyalty on the one hand and that sturdy tenacity and doggedness which everyone recognizes in that colloquial expression ‘guts.’”
Judge Medina Speaks (Matthew Bender & Co. 1954) (M. Virtue, ed.) at 168. Judge Medina graduated Columbia Law School in 1912. He was appointed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1947, and to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (succeeding Learned Hand) in 1953. He served until 1980 — at 92, the oldest member of the federal bench. He died in 1990 at the age of 102.
